Block Livedesk
The block Livedesk provides a powerful tool for distance learning support through multiple forums spread into a lot of course units. It has two essential advantages :
- It increases drastically support productivity by centralizing the monitoring of all concerned forums in a single place.
- It monitors all forums in real time, and is organized to allow a pool of attenders to work concurrently to attend queries.
(The above view is the Livedesk access door aspect in course with admin capabilities.)
Summary
The administrator defines as many Livedesk instances that are needed to support group of monitorable activities. Usually a Livedesk is mounted for attending a set of forums or other observable activities alltogether by a group of attenders supporting collaboratively the users.
An instance will define some processing parameters and a list of activites to monitor. Further the Livedesk instance is attached to a Livedesk block instance (image above) wich will operate as an access point. Several block instances is distinct course may give access to the same Livedesk instance. The access is controlled by a capability attached to the door.
Requirements
No special requirement is needed to use the Livedesk.
Livedesk has been programmed for MySQL. We have no garanty yet for it being working on PostGreSQL. Anyway there should not be a huge work to check SQL statements for this environment.
Note : Livedesk block will install two triggers in MySQL, thus the current running user for MySQL should have trigger creation permission.
Installation
As usual for blocks, unzip the archive in the 'blocks' folder of your Moodle implementation and run the administation notifications.
Main features
- Multiple Livedesk instances with one entry queue per instance
- Queues forum posts in real time
- Assignable Queue to any amount of forums in any courses in Moodle.
- Pops signal to any user having a living livedesk session when incoming requests
- Monitors the queue in real time
- Concurently (real time message lock) allows multiple users to pick requests and attend them (posting back in forum)
- Attender release time : allows attenders to be unsollicited during some amount of time after having attended a message.
- Attenders status based on local block capability
- Connected attenders information
- Service statistics
- Service opening/closing time
- Continuous event logging for statistics
- Full Ajax / Dhtmlx interface
Future devs :
- May queue other "attendable submissions" from other module types (f.e. tracker Moodle module)
Screens
- Main Operations screen
- Block Configuration screen
- Desk Instances Management screen
- Creating/Udating a livedesk instance
- Statistics Panel
Technical Implementations
Credits
The Livedesk block was written by Valery Fremaux and Wafa Adham for SupdeCo Montpellier (Commerce School)
